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October 15, 2022

On Oct 28, 1922 some 25,000 black-uniformed followers of Benito Mussolini gathered in Rome to demand the resignation of the government and the appointment of a new, Fascist administration.  The Italian state collapsed. Mussolini was asked to become prime minister. Thus commenced the first Fascist regime. 

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Now, one hundred years later almost to the day, the Brothers of Italy has become the largest party in the newly elected Italian parliament. It’s leader, Giorgia Meloni, will likely become Italy’s prime minister, the first woman to hold that position.  The Brothers of Italy has its roots in older Fascist parties, starting with Mussolini’s Fascist movement.

In 1919, Mussolini’s new Fascist Party issued a manifesto with demands for change in Italy favoring the working class. Among the demands were calls for:

  • Universal suffrage 
  • Voting for women;
  • Representation at government level of newly created national councils by economic sector;
  • The abolition of the Italian Senate 
  • The formation of a national council of experts for labor, for industry, for transportation, for the public health, for communications, etc. Selections to be made of professionals or of tradesmen with legislative powers, and elected directly to a general commission with ministerial powers.
  • Reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55.
  • A progressive tax on capital assets

Mussolini’s alternative to both free market capitalism and class-conscious socialism was corporatism — the organization of a national society into sectors of activity under the overall superintendence of the government. Corporatism sought cooperation between classes, not conflict. With corporatism, a nation would reach its maximum efficiency through harmony among all its working sub-sectors — business, agriculture, finance, family, and religion.

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Mussolini also followed the teachings of Georges Sorel, whose program for replacing bourgeois society was summarized in his book Reflections on Violence.  Roughly, Sorel advocated a combination of myth and violence to frighten the bourgeoisie and thus bring about their craven submission to new rulers of the state. 

Sorel’s introduction of myth as fundamental to syndicalist rule opened the door for Hitler to promote ethnic Aryan supremacy expressed in the right of the German people to build for themselves an Aryan volksgemeinschaft.  Mussolini turned to mythic memories of Rome to inspire the Italian people and mobilize them behind his party and administration.  Ethnic identities thus produced the volk, or the “national,” component in “National Socialism.”

Putin’s Russia Channels Mussolini

Today, Putin’s Russia rather nicely fits the volksgemeinschaft paradigm started by Mussolini.  For example, when incorporating Ukrainian territory into Russia, Putin said:

The West is ready to step over everything in order to preserve the neo-colonial system that allows it to parasitize, in fact, to plunder the world at the expense of the power of the dollar and technological dictates, to collect real tribute from humanity, to extract the main source of unearned prosperity, the rent of the hegemon…. That is why total desovereignization is in their interests.

I want to emphasize once again: it is precisely in greed, in the intention to maintain its unlimited power, that there are the real reasons for the hybrid war that the “collective West” is waging against Russia… They want to see us not as a free society, but as a crowd of soulless slaves.